Cui, Lu
Chen, Shih-Yu
Lerbs, Tristan
Lee, Jin-Wook
Domizi, Pablo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2903-0337
Gordon, Sydney
Kim, Yong-hun http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6737-9471
Nolan, Garry
Betancur, Paola
Wernig, Gerlinde http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5169-8731
Funding for this research was provided by:
Scleroderma Research Foundation (SPO 134886)
U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (SPO 132801)
Boehringer Ingelheim (SPO 136135)
Article History
Received: 17 April 2019
Accepted: 27 April 2020
First Online: 3 June 2020
Competing interests
: The authors declare no competing interests.
: De-identified patient specimens in paraffin and discarded fresh patient tissues were used for our studies as approved by the institutional review board at Stanford University, IRB-18891 and IRB-39881. Written, informed consent was obtained from the patient prior to surgery. Tissue was collected in the operating room, placed directly into sterile saline, and kept on ice for transport. We received primary lung tissues exclusively from patients with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis undergoing transplantation. Therefore, our cohort of patients represents severely fibrotic lung disease. It has been challenging to receive normal control-lung tissues. Although we have received lung tissues from normal lung resections from tumor resections from Stanford tissue bank as well as lungs from rapid autopsies, it appeared that the only normal lung tissues harvested during surgery by the tissue bank were of sufficient viability to include in our CyTOF studies; while other cell-type fractions appeared representative. We noted a bias toward less endothelial cells in the normal biopsies due to the relatively small amounts of lung tissue we received from excisional biopsies from the tissue bank. Animal studies were approved by the Stanford University Administrative Panel on Laboratory Animal Care. Mice were maintained in Stanford University Laboratory Animal Facility in accordance with Stanford Animal Care and Use Committee and National Institutes of Health guidelines (SU-APLAC 30911 and SU-APLAC 30912).